It’s also the name of my blog. Nature Network were kind enough to allow me some virtual real estate here, so I’ll be mirroring posts here, possibly with an eye to migrating depending on the Bells and Whistles situation.
I’m an anthropologist! I can say that now for real, having last week gone through that rite of passage known as the thesis viva. I’m also a biologist and I’ve had fingers in the pies of linguistics and psychology.
What I’m really interested in is evolution and human behaviour. Cultural evolution, to be specific, which is an expanding interdisciplinary field looking at how aspects of culture can be understood with evolutionary principles. I mainly use phylogenetic and comparative methods to look at cross-cultural diversity, and my area of focus is the Austronesian-speaking societies of the Pacific.
Culture evolves! has a years worth of posts for you to flick back through if you’re looking to see what I’m about. My last (not very scientific) entry reported on smoking rooks, but in general I try to be a bit more opinionated and less cutesy.
Kiaora!
Hi Fiona, welcome! I did 3 years of evolutionary psychology up at Durham as an undergrad with Dr Anne Campbell; I’m surprised however that the place I work now (Institute of Psychiatry) doesn’t talk about evolutionary psych much if at all…
I’m interested because I study neurological diseases, some of which have a genetic basis, and I wonder if they’ve survived in the gene pool because they are associated with some positive characteristics just so long as you don’t survive into middle age….
Hi Paul, sorry to take so long to reply! I think psychology and other brain-focused departments are so variable in their knowledge of, or attitudes towards, evolution. Evolutionary psychology is such a broad church now, too, and includes a number of different approaches, so it’s a shame that psychology doesn’t fully take on board such an integrative framework.